Star Trek fans did a lot of phaser clutching back in 2008 when director J.J. Abrams said he wanted to make his iteration of Trek more like Star Wars. “All my smart friends liked Star Trek,” Abrams said at the time. “I preferred a more visceral experience.” For Star Trek Beyond, Abrams handed the keys over to director Justin Lin, and he took a more hands-off approach as producer. Of the three Star Trek movies under the Abrams banner, Beyond is the one most like a visceral Star Wars adventure.
Lin is most famous for the four Fast and Furious films he directed, and his gifts for staging adrenaline pumping action sequences are on full display here. He also directed two episodes of the cult sitcom Community, so Lin knows how to handle ensembles and comedy as well. Amidst all the action is a script by Simon Pegg – who also plays Chief Engineer Scotty – and Doug Jung that honors the ideals and ethos of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry. The end result is a movie that focuses more on the wow factor than it needs to, but is still immensely enjoyable because of it.
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It’s times like these that I wonder if Roger Ebert ever faced the problem I’m having. Does that make it sound like I’m putting myself in the same ballpark as Roger Ebert? I’m not. I am to Roger Ebert what Caddyshack II is to Caddyshack. (As per review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the sequel currently stands at 4%(!) positive compared to the original’s 75% rating. So, yeah, that seems fair.) If anything, the higher rating isn’t high enough to properly gauge the late, great film critic’s skills. Still, did he ever review a remake of a movie he so beloved, and felt so close to, that he wasn’t sure if he could fairly assess the remake on its own merits? That was my worry going into the 2016 version of Ghostbusters.
If pop culture-obsessed children of the 1980s made a top ten list of movies that should be treated most like Lennie’s beloved rabbits in Of Mice and Men, the original Ghostbusters would be a heavy contender for number one. I turned five the summer it was released, and if you weren’t there, it’s impossible to overstate the absolute phenomenon that the movie was. A photo exists of my entire family wearing white shirts with the Ghostbusters logo emblazoned on the front, each of our names ironed onto the pocket. I vividly remember Ghostbusters being the very first VHS rental for my family’s freshly purchased VCR.
There’s a lot of history here is all I’m saying.
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Director Todd Solondz has a really sick sense of humor. In 2014, he must have laughed heartily when The Hollywood Reporter described his next film as “several stories featuring people who find their life inspired or changed by one particular dachshund, who seems to be spreading comfort and joy.” The article doesn’t make clear whether or not Solondz was the one who supplied that synopsis, but I like to imagine a ghoulish grin spreading across his face when he read it. There’s very little comfort to be had in Wiener-Dog, the quasi-sequel to Solondz’s breakout debut film Welcome to the Dollhouse, and almost no joy at all. There are plenty of laughs, though, in the quiet, sardonic chuckle variety.
Solondz is noted for exploring the blackest of comedy through his suburbanite characters, and Wiener-Dog is no exception. The Hollywood Reporter was right in one aspect – the picture consists of four separate vignettes, all linked by a stoic, little lady dachshund who is known by her various temporary owners as Wiener-Dog, Doody, and Cancer. If there is a theme shaping up for the year 2016 in filmmaking, it seems to be cruelty to animals, particularly dogs. The depiction of the wry and stomach-churning fate of little Wiener-Dog/Doody/Cancer makes the dog abuse in The Lobster seem easy to take by comparison. The penultimate scene of Wiener-Dog is a gob-smacking end to a movie that’s one-quarter brilliant, one-quarter inspired, and one-half just above what you might find at a student film festival.
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Sometimes a movie comes along that defies any kind of deep intellectual interpretation. It simply unspools its crazy internal logic before your eyes and dares you not to get caught up in the madness you’re witnessing. Swiss Army Man is that movie. It takes the concept of magical realism and twists everything you think you know about narrative expectation into a pretzel. For ninety minutes, I could not believe what I was seeing. I was so caught up in what would happen next, the full joy of the experience didn’t hit me until it was all over. Part of that was never being able to predict where the script was going.
The guys who wrote and directed that script, Dan Kwan and Daniel Sheinert (credited jointly as “Daniels”), establish within the first ten minutes that Swiss Army Man would be crazily, stupefyingly original. When the hero rides a farting corpse like a jet ski to escape a deserted island, I knew the writers were issuing a cinematic challenge. I’ll admit, I was hesitant at first. I can enjoy potty humor as well as anyone, at least in limited doses. But when Hank (Paul Dano) investigates the dead body that washes up on the desolate beach where he's stranded, all that happens at first is the farting. I wondered if that would be the extent of the writer-directors’ imagination. Then came the aforementioned riding of the corpse like a jet ski, with Hank pulling on the dead man’s necktie like a throttle for increased speed. Challenge accepted.
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The Neon Demon is an odious and hateful movie. It traffics in a base misogyny that masquerades as high art. Director Nicolas Winding Refn has tried to complicate the issue of that misogyny by populating his movie with an almost exclusively female cast. The fact that the women who are punished and degraded in The Neon Demon suffer their fate mostly at the hands of other women doesn’t make it any less troubling.
To counter this baseness, Refn collaborated with two women on the script, Mary Laws and Polly Stenham. In an interview with The Evening Standard, Refn intimates that he wanted to work with a woman on this new script because of his perceived issues with writing female characters. “I always set out wanting to make films about women but it always ends up being about men. Maybe it’s because I don’t know how to write them.”
In the same interview, Stenham acknowledges Refn’s reputation for treating the women in his movies poorly. “He’s got a lot of stick for doing films some people think are violently misogynistic. So he approached me with the idea of doing something different.” His choice of collaborators on this project doesn’t give the impression that he’s trying to grow as an artist when it comes to his female characters, though, which I think was the intended effect. Instead, it feels like cover for Refn to indulge in an even more extreme misogyny than what’s been found in his previous work.
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I’m a runner, and I live in Texas. The day after I saw Finding Dory, I ran seven miles in 86° heat with 70% humidity. I promise I’m not bragging. The sequel to the 2003 Pixar smash hit Finding Nemo actually helped me get through that run. While I was baking in the heat, my mind wandered back to the theater several times – to the cool, wet mise-en-scéne of the movie’s oceanic setting. One of my favorite things about Finding Nemo was the gorgeous underwater animation, and the meticulous care that was clearly spent bringing the world beneath the surface to life. Finding Dory absolutely excels in these areas, too. If you find aquariums soothing, you know what I mean.
Aside from the visuals, Finding Dory also does an admirable job trying to match the magic and fun of the original. It doesn’t quite make as big of a splash as its predecessor, but it’s a close call. Close enough to make Finding Dory a really rewarding time at the movies. I don’t know what it is about the deep sea environs that translate so well to the Pixar style of animation, but, for me, both Finding Nemo and Finding Dory are absolutely mesmerizing in a way few other Pixar movies are. The Toy Story franchise comes closest to achieving the same effect, but even the first rate animation of those pictures don’t beguile me in the same way that the Finding movies do.
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The one thing that’s missing from Weiner is what makes good documentaries great. The best docs are able to dig deep below the surface of their subjects and discover a sense of who the person being studied really is. That never quite happens with Weiner, the documentary about scandal-plagued former U.S. congressman Anthony Weiner’s attempts to mount a comeback by running for mayor of New York City. I left the theater not knowing the man any more intimately than when I arrived, and the film feels lesser for it. That’s not to say Weiner isn’t entertaining. At times laugh-out-loud funny, infuriating, and depressing, the movie is a fascinating look inside a political campaign’s stupendously epic meltdown.
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Do you know someone who insists that there’s no such thing as an original idea in movies anymore? It’s just the same six or so stories that they tell over and over, they say. If you do, look that person straight in the eye and tell them that they are dead wrong. Because The Lobster exists. This is a movie that almost defies explanation. The way it improbably blends romance, the blackest of comedy, and existential horror is spectacularly original. The Lobster is as haunting as it is unique, and it’s a film that won’t be easy for me to shake any time soon.
Set in either a dystopian future or simply a world wholly different from our own, the society in this story finds loneliness abhorrent. Anyone not in a committed relationship must check into a resort where they have 45 days to either find a partner or be turned into the animal of their choosing. It’s a delightfully absurd premise, which writer-director Yorgos Lanthimos sadistically uses to lull his audience into a false sense of security during the first act of the picture.
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There’s a question about cinematic adaptations, sequels, and remakes that I’ve finally learned to stop asking: “Do we really need another movie version of a Shakespeare play?” or “How many Jane Austen movies can they possibly make?” I’ve stopped asking, because it’s the wrong question. Aside from purely economically driven choices in matters of art, which should always be open to harsh scrutiny, there are many reasons a filmmaker might choose to revisit well-worn source material. The right approach is to look at each film in its own right and ask, “Does this movie do something new and fresh?” Writer-director Whit Stillman’s Love and Friendship, an adaptation of Jane Austen’s comedic novella Lady Susan, certainly does.
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Would you be interested in participating in an athletic event that’s been held annually for almost 30 years, attempted about 1200 times, and finished by only 10 people? It’s a race so punishing that most people quit before they’re even a fifth of the way through the course. “No,” would be the honest and sane answer. “Who on Earth would do such a thing?” You’d be right to answer that way, and not many people would fault you for doing so.
The documentary The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young is about the few brave souls who gladly, and in many cases repeatedly, answer “Yes!” The film examines the event’s history and the athletes participating in the 2012 race, including their personal philosophies about life and what compels them to sign up for such a grueling few days. We then seamlessly transition into a competition documentary, to watch and wait for who – if anyone – will be able to complete the 60 hour, 100+ mile trial by misery.
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Because the creative minds behind Keanu previously worked on MadTV before getting their own series, Key and Peele, it seems lazy to say that the movie feels like a five-minute sketch extended for 95 more. If the tired and worn out premise fits, though…
In the grand tradition of movies like A Night at the Roxbury and Superstar, Keanu sustains genuinely funny material for sixty whole seconds at a time before reminding you that the movie’s concept wore out its welcome after about twenty minutes.
The plot is set in motion by a kitten who escapes a grizzly shootout between rival drug gangs and finds his way to the doorstep of loser Rell Williams. Rell (Jordan Peele) is suffering a recent break-up with his girlfriend. She left because he’s basically a slob who is going nowhere in life. When Rell’s cousin Clarence (Keegan-Michael Key) learns of the devastating break-up, he rushes over for consolation, but finds Rell is already taking solace in caring for the kitten, whom he’s named Keanu.
In an early example of one of the bits that genuinely made me laugh, Rell’s obsession with Keanu leads him to make the kitten the centerpiece of a series of photographs that he plans on making into a calendar. Each picture is a scene from a different movie (e.g., The Shining, Beetlejuice) with Keanu as the star. It’s as adorable and hilarious as you might imagine. I thought the pop culture influenced comedy would be something I could latch onto, but moments like these are too few and far between to sustain laughter throughout the picture.
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The most interesting thing about A Hologram for the King is its title. It isn’t a bad movie, but about the best I can do is damn it with faint praise. It’s just okay. Based on the novel by Dave Eggers, Hologram tells the story of Alan Clay, a down-on-his-luck salesman who travels to Saudi Arabia to pitch a new I.T. and teleconferencing system to the King. Alan’s company spent millions developing this revolutionary new system, which incorporates hologram technology so that corporations and (in this case) governments can hold meetings with people across the globe in a way speaker phones and video monitors could never do. A trip that should take about a week turns into months, however, as Alan and his team are continually rebuffed by the royal officials: they are given a tent with no air conditioning, no food, and no Wi-Fi signal to prepare their presentation. They don’t even know when the King will be in town, much less when he will view their presentation. Along the way, we learn about Alan’s problems, and watch as he makes connections with an eccentric cab driver, a Saudi doctor, and the Danish ambassador to the Middle Eastern country.
A Hologram for the King is so episodic that it just barely hangs together as a narrative. Day after day Alan oversleeps and misses the shuttle from the hotel to the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade, where his team is trying to prepare for their presentation. Each time he sleeps through his alarm, Alan calls Yousef, a man the hotel concierge recommends. Yousef isn’t so much a cab driver as he is a guy with a somewhat reliable car who is willing to drive Alan the several hour commute. This is a fish-out-of-water story, and Yousef lies squarely in the territory of the character whose eccentricity belies his ability to lead our hero through this strange new land.
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I never really got into comic books as a kid, so their stylistic elements in big screen adaptations aren’t a part of my artistic appreciation as an adult. It means quite a lot, then, that there is a sequence in Captain America: Civil War that even novices like me can realize comes from a powerful connection to the source material: the splash page. Put simply, a splash page is one big drawing that takes up a full page (or two) of any single comic. It’s meant to really catch the reader’s attention, a sort of aesthetic exclamation point in the middle of the story.
The directing team of brothers Anthony and Joe Russo create at least one moment that is on par with the grandeur of the splash page. In fact, the visual design of the whole film evinces a deep respect and love for their movie’s funny book origin, and its uniquely cinematic qualities. The script, by writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, offers up a fairly straightforward central conflict while successfully bringing together multiple subplots that are all in service of the larger story.
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From frame one, actor Don Cheadle’s feature film directorial debut pulses with kinetic energy and excitement that doesn’t break until the last credit rolls. Miles Ahead covers a few hectic days in the life of jazz icon Miles Davis and Cheadle does triple duty co-writing, directing, and starring. There are three major pitfalls that movies in the biopic genre often find hard to avoid: 1) trying to cover so much of its subject’s life that the movie becomes unfocused; 2) creating a glowing portrait of the subject that erases any real-life hard edges; and 3) following a standard formula of rising to fame/power from humble beginnings, a tragic fall from grace, and finally redemption. Movies detailing the life of an artist or musician find it particularly hard to avoid that last one. Walk the Line and Ray come instantly to mind. Miles Ahead deftly sidesteps all three. This is the un-biopic biopic, and it’s every bit as passionate and bold as the music of the man whose story it tells.
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There is a moral ambiguity to Eye in the Sky that acts wonderfully as a test for each person watching it. Depending on your feelings about the importance of maintaining a moral high ground relative to your enemy, it’s possible to have a very different experience with the film than the person sitting right next to you. Even if you agree with that person on how the so-called “war on terror” is prosecuted, it’s easy to read the message the movie is sending in a wildly different way. That is Eye in the Sky’s most powerful strength. It deftly presents opposing sides to the ongoing debate of the best way to stop terrorists, then forces you to think critically about the issue and pick a side. Dramatically speaking, the film is also an incredibly taut thriller; it’s expertly paced for maximum tension. The picture achieves this by taking the overused “ticking time bomb scenario” and adding an element that complicates what is usually presented as an easy call by films and television shows of this nature.
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Midnight Special is many things. It’s a moody science fiction throw back in the vein of E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It’s an intense on-the-run movie which takes place over the space of a few frantic days. It shows the destructive force of religious cults, and the extreme measures true believers will go to in the name of their convictions. Ultimately, Midnight Special is a tightly wound tale of a father and mother who will do anything for their child, who is at the heart of it all.
Director Jeff Nichols’ first two films, Shotgun Stories and Take Shelter, are both meditations on American families in the process of breaking down. In the former, years of uneasy pressure between two sets of half-brothers in Arkansas come to a boil when the patriarch of the two clans suddenly dies. The latter examines a man in Ohio whose family must face the consequences of his slow descent into mental illness. So it’s no surprise that family is at the core of Nichols’ fourth and latest film, as well.
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Well, it was as bad as I expected. Whenever I make the decision to write about a movie (being extremely selective in what I review is the ultimate perk of writing as a hobby), I do my absolute best to avoid the critical response around a film before I have a chance to see it myself. I don’t want to be swayed by anyone else’s opinion but my own. I want to react to the movie with an open, unbiased mind. That was near impossible with Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I saw it on opening night, but I was still inundated by headlines on social media, not to mention every website starting with “www” having an opinion about how terrible the film was. The internet even graced me with the Sad Affleck meme. That was particularly delicious, in a “worst angels of our nature” sort of way.
When I sat down in the theater, waiting for the lights to dim, I steeled myself against all I had seen that day. I’m willing to give any movie a fair shake and Batman v Superman was no different. I did my duty as a critic to leave any preconceived notions I had at the ticket counter, so it’s without any reservation that I write these words: Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice is an utter mess. There are a few elements worthy of praise, to be sure, but they are so few and far between that they are essentially inconsequential to the overall effect.
BvS suffers from kitchen sink syndrome. In an effort to wow the audience, as well as get their own cinematic universe kick-started, DC Comics and screenwriters Chris Terrio and David S. Goyer packed any and everything they could think of into an interminable two-and-a-half-hour assault on the senses. Hell, there’s even a literal kitchen sink. Used as a weapon during the titular hero-on-hero battle royale. Actually, if memory serves, it was a bathroom sink. So the movie gets one half credit for avoiding complete cliché.
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Last week I wrote about Richard Linklater’s film Everybody Wants Some, his “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused. 10 Cloverfield Lane could very easily be described similarly alongside its 2007 predecessor, the found footage monster movie Cloverfield. But producer J.J. Abrams has instead taken to calling the film a “blood relative” of the original, which he also produced. Think of the two Cloverfields as feature length, big budget anthology entries in a show like The Twilight Zone, or The Outer Limits. Their connective tissue is a sci-fi milieu, and a rich atmosphere that envelops you in dread.
The film’s official synopsis is, “Monsters come in many forms.” That is a supremely superb and succinct sketch – an excellent example of the Shakespearean proverb, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” The set up to the film, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is equally simple. A young woman named Michelle survives a car crash and wakes up in her rescuer’s underground fallout shelter. The man, named Howard, tells Michelle that some invading force has poisoned the air, and that it’s not safe to go above ground for a year or two. Michelle and Howard aren’t alone, though. An acquaintance of Howard, a young man named Emmett, saw that the older man was acting strange, and convinced Howard to let him into the shelter before sealing it.
The next hour and a half plays out as an incredibly tense chamber drama. 10 Cloverfield Lane is a masterclass in paranoia filmmaking. Even though Emmett believes everything Howard says about the danger above ground – the older man claims he saw atomic-like blasts – Emmett didn’t actually witness anything himself. Complicating matters, Howard proves to be unstable at best, kind and fatherly but capable of exploding into bouts of rage when contradicted. So, Michelle isn’t sure who to trust or what to believe. In addition to Howard’s erratic behavior, Michelle can’t be totally sure he didn’t run her off the road in the first place. She also awoke in the concrete bunker with her leg chained to the wall. That early scene is evocative of a movie like Saw, and it succeeds in producing the uneasy feeling that at any moment the movie could shift into torture porn.
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Legendary filmmaker Howard Hawks’ definition of what makes a “good movie” was pretty simple: “Three great scenes, no bad ones.” By that definition, director Richard Linklater’s new movie, Everybody Wants Some, comes close. There are no bad scenes, but by my count there are only two great ones. Linklater himself has been quoted as saying the movie is a “spiritual sequel” to his 1993 near-classic* film Dazed and Confused, so it’s instructive to compare the two.
Everybody Wants Some doesn’t reach the dizzying highs of its predecessor because of its focus. If you aren’t familiar with Dazed and Confused, that picture’s core was an ensemble of misfits and oddballs on the last day of school in May 1976. (Or, to use the parlance of Judd Apatow and Paul Feig’s seminal television show that Linklater’s movie likely inspired, the freaks and geeks entering their first or last years of high school.) Junior-high student and baseball pitcher Mitch was the audience surrogate in that film. He was tormented over the course of the movie by some of the newly minted seniors who relished the opportunity to haze the incoming freshmen using a giant paddle. Ben Affleck played the most assholish of this group, O’Bannion, and it’s particularly satisfying when he gets his comeuppance.
I bring up that group of jerks because their college counterparts are at the center of Everybody Wants Some. Their edges have been softened considerably, but these college jocks act like masters of their universe, because they are. Their preoccupations are what you’d expect them to be, the three B’s: baseball, beer, and bangin’, not necessarily in that order. Because that’s who and what the movie devotes its time to, there is an emotional resonance that is conspicuously missing, particularly when compared to Dazed and Confused.
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Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a dramedy that isn’t funny enough to make it memorable as a comedy, and it isn’t moving enough to make it memorable as a drama. It’s muddled, not really sure what it wants to be. The movie suffers immensely from this lack of commitment. It also actively refuses to take any meaningful stance on the issues central to its plot – journalists covering the American invasion of Afghanistan – leaving the picture like a news story that fails to inform or entertain.
The story revolves around real life American journalist Kim Baker and her adventures while covering the war in Afghanistan. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (the military phonetic alphabet translation of the letters WTF, so the title is a joke on the popular shortened version of the expression “What the fuck?”) is based on Baker’s memoir, The Taliban Shuffle: Strange Days in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Shepherded through the book-to-screen process by star Tina Fey’s production company Little Stranger, the movie transforms its war-torn backdrop into a self-discovery tale with a splash of romantic comedy. It’s an unlikely setting for such a story, one the filmmakers would have been wise to avoid.
There is a scene in the middle of WTF when an Afghan woman asks Baker what made her decide to travel half way around the world to cover the war. Fey, as Baker, sums up her need to escape her life using the exercise bike at her gym to illustrate her point. Baker tells the woman that one day she noticed an indentation in the carpet just in front of her regular stationery bike. She realized it was where the bike used to sit before a gym employee moved it for one reason or another. In that moment, Baker says, she understood she had spent countless hours on that bike, only to move backward three feet. “Wow,” her interlocutor observes, “that’s the most American white lady story I’ve ever heard.”
It’s a funny moment to be sure, and it’s a sly attempt at winking at the audience. We know exactly what kind of story we’re telling, the movie says, and our effort at being up front about it will hopefully earn us some points with you, the audience. It doesn’t, though, because despite this self-awareness by the filmmakers, the rest of the movie is as predictable as you would expect. WTF is Eat, Pray, Love goes to war, and that’s just as disappointing of an exercise as you might expect.
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